The Online Guide to Spam Email!

Here you will find all the information you ever needed regarding spam email.  We have composed a 14 section guide below which you can browse page by page.

If you have any questions please contact our staff.

Quick Links to Our Anti Spam Features!
1. What is spam?	8. Isn't spam illegal?
2. When is spam spam?	9. How big a problem is it?
3. The term comes from?	10. What are DNS blacklists?
4. Why do people send spam?	11. What is an open relay?
5. Where did it come from?	12. How can I stop spam?
6. How did they get my email?	13. How do spam filters work?
7. Does unsubscribing work?	14. Send spam free bulk email?

 

3 of 14 - Where does the term 'Spam' come from?

The prevailing theory is that the term refers to a classic skit by Monty Python's Flying Circus.  In the skit a couple in a restaurant tries in vain to order something that does not have SPAM in it.  As the waitress lists endless dishes, all of them containing increasing amounts of SPAM, a group of Vikings in the corner begin to sing "spam, spam, spam, spam..." until all useful information is drowned out.  But where did the connection between unwanted SPAM and unwanted Spam come from?

It did not start with email.  The term has its roots, in relation with the Internet, in the late 1980s or early 1990s in Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSH).  MUDs and MUSHes are online, real-time, interactive, text-based virtual environments.  According to one source, a MUSH user programmed a macro key to type "spam spam spam..." in a MUSH until his connection was terminated by a SysAdmin.  He was subsequently referred to as "the !*%@ who spammed us" by other members.  From MUDs and MUSHes the term Spam began to be used to describe Excessive Multi-Posting (EMP) on Usenet groups.  Usenet 'news' groups are forums where 'authors' can 'publish articles' to be read by other users and subsequently discussed.  not much of what gets 'published' could ever be considered 'news' by any reasonable standard of measure, but the original term is still used today.  Under normal circumstances a user would post a message to one or to a small number of relevant newsgroups, asking questions or airing opinions.  By using the software to automate the process of posting, it became possible to post the same message to thousands of newsgroups ensuring a readership in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

The very first spam email was sent on May 1st, 1978 by a Digital Equipment Corporation sales representative advertising a computer equipment demonstration.  An attempt was made to send this email to all of the Arpanet users on the west coast of the U.S.  The reaction on the part of the recipients was not unlike what you may expect today.  Remember that Arpanet was a military project and commercial use was not acceptable.  At the time, there was no such thing as an email Spam filter to stop Spam mail because there was no Spam.  In April 1994, the Phoenix law firm, Canter and Siegel, advertised their services by posting a message to several thousand newsgroups.  This was probably the first automated large scale commercial use of Spam, and was the incident that popularized the term, which up until then had been exclusively part of the arcane vocabulary of Multi-User Dungeons.

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